Huawei might not be a big brand name in the U.S.,
but the Chinese manufacturer has claimed its place as the world's No. 3 handset
maker, and its products are improving all the time. Huawei's latest oversized
smartphone, the Ascend Mate 7, shows that while there's much room for
improvement on the software side, the company has hardware and performance
pretty much nailed down. And should it secure itself a firm foothold in Western
markets, it could prove a major challenger to the more established brands.
The Ascend P7,
released earlier this year, proved what Huawei could build if it really tried. Granted, the P7 borrowed
heavily from the look of Apple's iPhone 4 series, but nonetheless it was a
solid, well-built phone that outclassed all-plastic rivals. The P7 was undone
by its sluggish, ugly software, however — as one AC editor put it in the days
following the announcement, "it's nice until you turn it on." The
gulf in performance between the P7 and its rivals was vast, and it felt a few
years removed from the cutting edge of Android.
Four months on, the Mate 7 underscores this focus
on premium materials at the high end, while eliminating some (but not all) of
the outstanding issues with Huawei's EMUI software. This is an enourmous
metal-backed phone around the size of the iPhone 6 Plus, but with an extra half-inch of screen to its
name. It's a 1080p panel, not 2K like some rivals — at IFA Huawei told us the
battery cost of doing 1440p on a smartphone isn't worth it just yet.
Nevertheless, it's good looking, and sufficiently sharp even at 6 inches.
So here's a phone that's big, bold, and
definitely not for everyone. As Samsung and others have
proved, though, enormous phones have their benefits. For one, the Mate 7 makes
a pretty capable portable tablet, while still being relatively pocketable —
especially given its epic battery life, which we'll get to later. Just don't
try to use it with one hand.
The Mate 7 doesn't just feel like a
premium phone relative to Huawei's earlier efforts, it's an attractive,
solidly-built handset in general. The slightly curved, chamfered metal back
blends into plastic sections at the top and bottom — present for RF visibility
— and gives the impression of an almost seamless chassis. This thing could
easily have been built by one of the bigger names in smartphones.
The back
panel also houses one of the Mate 7's most surprisingly compelling features —
the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. The last major Android phone to ship with
a fingerprint reader on the back was the HTC One Max. Its swipe-based implementation was widely
panned, but Huawei's take is closer to Apple's Touch ID, and better for it. The sensor is
touch-activated, and can recognize fingerprints in any orientation. And while
it's not 100 percent reliable, but it's pretty damn close. What's more, because
it's touch, not swipe-activated, using it feels like less of an imposition than
Samsung's front-mounted finger reader.
You can also use the fingerprint
scanner as the world's most awkwardly-placed shutter key. Unless you're taking
lots of portrait photos, we wouldn't recommend it.
Speaking of
cameras, the Mate 7's 13-megapixel rear shooter is surprisingly decent across
the board. There's plenty of detail and dynamic range to be found in daylight
shots, and colors are generally bright and appealing, even in very bright
scenes. In darker conditions, software sharpening kicks in, capturing more
detail over a few seconds. Though imaging performance remains hit-and-miss on
many high-end Android phones, Huawei has managed to field a camera that stands
up when compared to more expensive flagships.
The Mate 7's internals are also suitably high-end
— a custom-made octa-core Kirin CPU (manufactured by the Huawei-owned
Hisilicon), consisting of four low-power ARM Cortex A7 cores and four
high-power Cortex A15s, backed up by a Mali T628 GPU. That's similar to what
we've seen in Samsung Exynos processors of late, and Huawei's implementation
seems just as fast — provided the software's set up correctly.
Out of the box, though, on the prerelease
firmware we've been using, Huawei's software isn't exactly configured for peak
performance. Under Settings > Power Saving, the default power plan is
"smart" which adjusts performance for modest battery savings.
Switching to "Normal" speeds things up considerably. In fact, with
this change made, the Mate 7's speed and fluidity rivals that of most Android
flagships. And as for battery life, the phone's enormous 4,100mAh fixed cell
provides a ridiculous amount of power anyway. (To put that number in
perspective, the Nexus 7 tablet packs a 3,900mAh battery.) You're looking at
two or more days of normal usage, and a guaranteed day of use, even with the
most strenuous of workloads.
Huawei's EMUI 3.0 fixes up a lot of
our nagging issues with previous versions, but some unfortunate sticking points
remain. First up, the positive: Things are smoother and generally
better-looking all round — in a big way. With the new-style triangle, circle
and square navigation icons from Android L, and
colors to match in other areas, Huawei is (sorta) gearing up for the future of
the platform. A focus on lines and circles throughout gives the UI a more
geometric look, with areas clearly inspired (though not lifted wholesale) from
Apple's iOS.
Elsewhere,
though it's the same mess of rounded icons and cartoonish-looking themes we've
previously had to deal with. The company insists on making every app icon
round, with its own colored background, and this persists throughout the UI,
not just in the launcher. Want to get around it? The only real option is to
install a custom launcher and use an icon pack. Even then, the problem isn't
completely eliminated.
Huawei's
white notification panel presents some problems too — icons for media playback
controls are obscured, and there's a jarring transition between white and black
when archiving emails in Gmail. This seems like the sort of thing additional
testing would've cleared up, and given that we're still using a pre-release
device there's a chance it could be fixed before the Mate 7 goes on sale.
Nevertheless, these are all pretty basic things to be getting wrong.
EMUI 3.0 is a major improvement on
earlier Huawei efforts, but software remains the company's Achilles' heel.
Beyond the bugs and design gripes we've mentioned, the likes of Samsung have
more compelling uses for an oversized handset, including a wealth of multitasking options. That Huawei seems to
have overcome the issues with lag and stuttering that affected some earlier
devices is promising, however.
If the
Ascend Mate 7 is any indication, Huawei is a manufacturer to watch in the
coming year. It's always been a big deal in terms of the numbers, but over the
past twelve months it's shown its ability to compete on product quality as
well. And if the user experience can be brought up to the standard of its
external hardware, the high-end space could become even more competitive in
2015.
